F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  Unsurprisingly, depressingly, it’s been proven that men target men in talent hunts and men talk to men when showcasing expertise. In 2013, a US study revealed that, for the first two months of the year, only 19 percent of newspaper stories quoted women. That statistic is not uncommon. New York Times reporters are four times more likely to interview a dude. Women consistently account for less than 30 percent of speaking roles in Hollywood. No wonder: we also comprise only 7 percent of directors. We could, all of us, in every living-wage job or high-paying industry, have “ones we lost” folders. Everywhere we turn, women are being silenced, shut out, emphatically and implicitly told to go away. Well, let me repeat: Fuck that. If those of us who’ve been pushed out ever want to be more than squatters in a man’s world, we need to acknowledge our dismal surroundings, do a feminist Miley Cyrus “Wrecking Ball,” and then get to building our own awesome shit.

  Of all the many social trends that are emblematic of women’s inequality in the workplace, none is as longstanding or as starkly evident as the wage gap, and, thus, none has been so consistently attacked and dismissed. It’s so battered that, in September 2016, during the height of the presidential PR war in the US, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) released a tip sheet titled “Five Ways to Win an Argument About the Gender Wage Gap.” The 79.6 annual wage ratio figure in the US, the sheet acknowledged, is often derided as “misleading, a myth, or, worst of all, a lie.” (Canada’s wage gap ratio is actually slightly worse at 72 cents, down from 74.4 in 2009, giving it the seventh highest gap out of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.) The IWPR authors contended, however, that the naysayers were often disastrously simplifying a complex figure, usually explaining it away as a woman’s “choice” to work in lower-paying jobs or her “choice” to leave the labor force once she had children (sarcastic air quotes are totally mine and 100 percent intended). In reality, a plethora of research has shown that underlying factors are far more complicated, ranging from discrimination in pay, recruitment, job assignment, and promotion, and—yes, sure—lower earnings in traditionally women-centered occupations, as well as women’s disproportionate share of the family-care pie. (Why can’t we ever get a larger share of, say, the lemon meringue pie? Wouldn’t that be nice and also delicious?) But that doesn’t make it a lie, argued the authors, and what’s more, the very reasons it can be explained away—those listed above—are precisely the reason we can’t fall into the mythical-thinking trap.

  The myths IWPR countered in its tip sheet made regular appearances in my interviews with anti-feminists: that women choose to work in crappy jobs; that the most commonly used wage gap statistic doesn’t take account of differences in job sectors or hours worked; or (as we tackled in the previous chapter) that women just don’t want to work. It’s true that some industries and occupations don’t reflect the annual earnings wage gap. Some are even worse. In the US, women physicians and surgeons earn 62 percent of what men earn; financial managers earn 67 percent, despite making up a larger percent of the job sector; chief executives earn 70 percent, and make up only one-quarter of that particular high-earning, high-power slice; and, even in jobs such as retail (sales) and housekeeping/janitorial (supervisors), the number hovers at 70 percent. In occupations where women’s earnings are close to on par with men’s, including maid/housekeeping positions, food preparation workers, office clerks, and even bus drivers, certain glum caveats remain. Those women a) also tend to comprise the majority of workers; or b) the jobs tend to be especially low-earning and precarious; and c) any higher earnings reflect successful collective bargaining among unions, making those jobs the exception, not the rule. Sometimes, there’s even option d) a nasty combination of the above factors and other less easily identifiable ones.

  What’s more, studies are now showing that the gap is already evident one year after college or university graduation, and it only continues to grow over the course of a woman’s lifetime. Call me morbid, but it makes me picture the wage gap as a big skull with a gaping maw. In 2012 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a study called “Graduating to a Pay Gap” that examined this grim trend. It discovered that one year after graduation, women were already earning just 82 percent of what their male peers earned. That number shrank after the study—perhaps anticipating ant-feminist outcry—controlled for hours worked, occupation, the former student’s major, and their current employment sector. But it didn’t disappear. Women teachers earned 89 percent of what men earned. In sales occupations, the gap sat at 77 percent. And among business majors, women earned just over $38,000 in their first year’s salary, while men earned a tad more than $45,000. Women tended to also dedicate a higher share of their salary toward paying off student debt. “The pay gap has been part of the workplace for so long,” wrote AAUW authors, “that it has become simply normal.” But it doesn’t have to be.

  In the previous chapter, I challenged the opt-out myth, arguing that, in many cases, evidence shows that the phrase “push out” might be a more accurate one. But just how bad is the so-called motherhood penalty? In her research work on the wage gap, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, discovered that the opt-out penalty can differ greatly by occupation. Among those who took an eighteen-month hiatus in employment over the course of fifteen years, women with MBAs experienced a 41 percent earnings decrease, women PhDs experienced a 29 percent wage decrease, and those with MDs saw a 15 percent drop. Goldin’s work also showed that MBAs tended to take more time off, largely because their jobs prohibited them from working more flexible schedules. As a result, they opted out entirely.

  In subsequent research, Goldin also discovered that women with high-earning spouses tend to have lower labor force participation rates. And if you think women fare better once their children are no longer infants—a logical assumption given the time demands post stork drop-off—think again: the impact of birth on a woman’s workforce participation only grows over time. High-earning jobs, particularly in our always-connected modern world, tend to reward long and continuous work hours. Such hours are not often tenable for women who are expected to take on the primary caretaker role. “A flexible schedule,” noted Goldin, “often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds.” That price can be even higher, however, for employees in fields in which a missed work day or an inability to meet a rigid schedule won’t just result in a lost promotion but very possibly a lost job. Many of these women don’t have a higher-earning spouse to fall back on, either because they’re single parents or because their partners tend to be in just as much of a jam as they are. To get an idea of just how much family can affect work and how reticent employers are to enact policies that might retain employees, we can examine the Athena-sized jump of Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD) cases in the US.

  As the name suggests, FRD cases are those that are filed based on discrimination against employees because of their family obligations, whether that’s pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood, or even caring for a family member. Over the past decade, such cases have risen 269 percent; employees have won 67 percent of those cases, and employers have forked over half a billion dollars in settlement fees. Cases that involve pregnancy are the most common FRD claim. Some of these cases, as reported in WorkLife Law’s 2016 report “Caregivers in the Workplace,” can involve subtle discrimination: women, for example, who are denied professional development opportunities because supervisors see them as less committed or more unreliable after they have children, or supervisors who believe mothers should be home with their kids and give new mothers less challenging assignments, later telling them they can’t advance because they aren’t ready.

  Discrimination can also be blatant. Here’s a small sampling of the 4,400 cases the WorkLife Law report surveyed. In one case, after a front-desk worker took time off to care for her sick daughter, a supervisor allegedly asked her, “How can you guarantee me
that two weeks from now your daughter is not going to be sick again? So what is it: your job or your daughter?” In another, a woman who was called into work on scant notice received a text from a supervisor that read, in part, “Look Melissa you have a child whom is medically disabled you do not belong in the workplace or in my clinic…! Go home [and] stay with your daughter—that’s where you belong, not here.” A pregnant part-time grocery store worker provided a doctor’s note informing her supervisor she couldn’t lift more than fifteen pounds and was terminated in response. A pregnant woman security guard, diagnosed with anemia, asked for permission to wear a second coat and was fired. In still another case, a woman was passed over for a promotion and was told it was because she already “had a full-time job at home with her children.” And it just goes on and on.

  It’s important to remember, too, that any solutions must take into account women’s various work experiences and their various lived experiences. Just as we must not default to white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight women when we’re discussing the challenges, we can’t default to them while we’re discussing the solutions either. The near 80 percent gap that’s often quoted is a better representation of white women’s earnings relative to white men’s. As discussed in previous chapters, that number shifts dramatically when we consider race and other factors that can influence employment and employment opportunity. “The solutions that you come up with will depend on what you diagnose as the problem,” Chandra Childers, a senior research associate with IWPR, told me. “And if you don’t understand the specific circumstances of each group of women, and even differences within those groups, that’s really going to influence what you think the problems are and then what you think the solutions are.” Still, some universal things could help.

  Canada and the US have the most expensive child care in the world, sharing the top three spots with Ireland. (Hi, Ireland! Welcome to our sad club!) In thirty-three states in the US, the annual in-state college tuition costs less than full-time child care for a four-year-old. In Massachusetts, for example, the annual cost of infant care is $17,062; annual tuition is $10,702. Infant care is also 15 percent more than average rent and takes up nearly 20 percent of an average family’s income. A minimum-wage worker would need to work 43 full-time weeks to pay for one year of care. And that’s just for one child. No wonder most can’t afford it.

  In Canada, Toronto is the most expensive city for daycare, at a median of $1,649 per month for infants and $1,150 per month for preschoolers. Vancouver and Calgary aren’t far behind. Indeed, the only province where parents fare well is Quebec, where the government subsidizes care; in Montreal the median monthly cost is just $164. And though Quebec’s system isn’t perfect—wait lists are long and spots don’t necessarily go to the families that need them most—it isn’t hard to imagine how big a difference affordable child care could make. That’s particularly true for women who are more likely to be the parent who leaves the labor force to care for children. Women’s lower earnings are often used to justify moves like these, putting women in a vicious cycle.

  Stronger maternity and paternity leave polices, particularly in the US, would also go a long way in guaranteeing that women on-ramp easily back into the workforce. Think of it as collectively helping them train for the sprint and the marathon. And the hurdles. Hell, everything. Raising the minimum wage would certainly help, especially the tipped minimum wage in the US, which sits at a terrifying $2.13. More laws allowing transparency when it comes to wages will also help. They would allow women to see just how persistent their wage gap is and to use the information to better bargain. Women and girls can be encouraged to enter traditionally male-dominated fields. Even negotiation training can be rethought so it doesn’t implicitly reinforce the idea that women are simply the pits at bargaining, and if they could negotiate better the gap would disappear. Neither are true. “What I worry about is sending the message that if women just negotiated, that would make the gender gap go away,” Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “And that’s just not an okay message.” Her pioneering research has shown that women aren’t just imagining things when they perceive they’ll be treated more negatively than a man for attempting to negotiate. Employers like their women to fall into stereotypes: to be team players, to be selfless, to not ask about money. Never mind that her research also shows at-home negotiations—the division of domestic labor and child care—also factors into a woman’s ability to negotiate shrewdly and successfully at work.

  This is where it gets really sticky: determining how much those gender expectations hamper a woman’s success in the workplace. Even if we enacted more policies and actually followed them this time (ahem, pay equity legislation), even if we untangled the thicket of reasons for the wage gap and gender disparity in the workforce, how much would plain discrimination still stand in the way? A January 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that “unexplained factors” accounted for 38 percent of the wage gap. That is, even once you establish control variables—differences in jobs, experience, and hours worked, for example—the gap remains. These “unexplained factors” are usually attributed, in large part, to discrimination, a shadowy thing that no control group can eliminate. Combine these challenges with the blatant discrimination women can experience in the STEM fields and you have a real-time case study of what happens when an industry has a thousand ways, both subtle and overt, to let women know the workforce is a difficult place for them to thrive.

  Then again, if you’re an anti-feminist, widespread workplace discrimination is feminist make-believe and none of this is true. As we saw in the last chapter, the anti-feminist movement largely tends to breeze past the complexity of women at work, capitalizing on the anxieties and impossibilities of work-life balance to present an answer that is seductively simpler: women don’t want to work, or, at least, most women don’t want to work, especially in male-dominated fields. Let’s remember what Karen Straughan told me when I asked her why she thought feminism was restrictive and prescriptive when it came to the ways in which it told women they could behave: How far are you willing to push people to do things that they otherwise would not do? The anti-feminist world view dictates that feminism is making women feel guilty for not studying physics, or engineering, or other male-heavy post-secondary fields. Feminism is also designed to make men feel awful, said Straughan, for even being in an engineering class, because, according to feminism (apparently), they are actively and meanly pushing women out. While most feminists would likely agree that it’s worth examining learning environments and diversity as well as the roadblocks women, people of color, and those who are LGBTQ-identified must hurdle over to reach those classrooms (or else land smack facedown on the pavement), I haven’t yet heard any say men don’t belong in them at all. Advocating to open the door wider surely disrupts the status quo and challenges “the way it’s always been,” but it doesn’t close the door on men. Neither does the push to examine and dismantle existing workplace conditions, culture, structures, and supports (or rather, more accurately in most cases, the lack of support).

  Yet Straughan didn’t seem to put much stock into the idea of an old boys’ club either, suggesting both that it doesn’t really exist and that, if it does, it’s the natural pecking order. “If she’s happier studying to be a psychologist than she would be studying physics, then why are we making her feel guilty for not studying physics? Or making her feel like a failure to the [feminist] cause?” Straughan asked. “And why are we making him feel guilty for being in an engineering program? Why are we saying, ‘There aren’t enough women there. What are you horrible men doing to keep women out?’” This sort of argument provides a convenient loophole: it doesn’t dictate what women must do, but preaches acceptance of what a woman is naturally inclined to do. It also removes systemic barriers and reduces everything to (unfettered) personal decisions. Straughan once told me she doesn’t like feminists because she can’t imagine
them ever doing rough-and-tumble stuff, like climbing trees, so I doubt she adheres to the traditional idea that a woman must be dainty and sweet. But like other anti-feminists, she strongly believes if a woman wanted to do something, she’d do it, period.

  Anti-feminists are fond of accusing any feminist who criticizes structural barriers of “damseling,” a derisive term that is particularly popular when it comes to discussing labor equity challenges. While talking about workforce discrimination, for instance, Alison Tieman once told me that “presenting narratives of female victimhood inclines women to see the world not in terms of what they can do but in terms of what is done to them.” If we really want women to fulfill their potential, she adds, society should encourage them to view the world in terms of not how they’re acted upon but how they act upon it. This can-do message that anti-feminists consistently return to celebrates women who have toughed it out while simultaneously condemning to their sad fates those who haven’t been able to do the same. Of course, they likely wouldn’t put it that way. They’d call it choice, and a natural one at that. Then they’d not-so-kindly ask feminists to stop making shit up, to stop making such a fuss, to stop calling out sexist work culture, and to just let everybody do what they do best: namely, the same sorts of things they’re always supposed to have done.